Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1831 - 10. RECORD MARKING STANDARD

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### 10. RECORD MARKING STANDARD

When RPC messages are passed on top of a byte stream transport protocol (like TCP), it is necessary to delimit one message from another in order to detect and possibly recover from protocol errors. This is called record marking (RM). One RPC message fits into one RM record.

A record is composed of one or more record fragments. A record fragment is a four-byte header followed by 0 to (2**31) - 1 bytes of fragment data. The bytes encode an unsigned binary number; as with XDR integers, the byte order is from highest to lowest. The number encodes two values -- a boolean which indicates whether the fragment is the last fragment of the record (bit value 1 implies the fragment is the last fragment) and a 31-bit unsigned binary value which is the length in bytes of the fragment's data. The boolean value is the highest-order bit of the header; the length is the 31 low-order bits. (Note that this record specification is NOT in XDR standard form!)

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Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1831 - 10. RECORD MARKING STANDARD